FlightFeather Social Networking Platform 0.3.1

[George Belotsky]

FlightFeather's goal is "social networking for everyone".  This means
that *anyone* should have a chance to run a *popular* social
networking site -- on minimal hardware, and without wasting bandwidth.

Release 0.3.1 is the current development release. It adds a safe
shutdown feature to the FlightFeather server, eliminating the need for
the two-step shutdown procedure described in "QuickStart.txt". The new
feature also allows you to stop the server remotely, from a list of
trusted IP addresses (set to just 127.0.0.1 by default).

The current beta release of FlightFeather is 0.2.8.  You can download
these releases (free/open source under the GPL) from the "BoSStats"
site, which runs on FlightFeather.

     http://www.bosstats.com/flightfeather.html

You are always welcome to participate in the discussion on the
"BoSStats" site; the topic covered (what makes a good boss, office
politics, etc.) is valuable in and of itself.  Please, however,
refrain from posting test comments, as the site is live.


A Brief Overview of FlightFeather and BoSStats
----------------------------------------------
FlightFeather is in its early stages, but it is functional.  You can
see the system in action on the BoSStats site.  BoSStats is
dedicated to improving the world of work: you can discuss what makes a
good boss, or share your experiences of office politics. You can also
comment and vote on the posts made by others.  The application does
not set cookies, and no registration is required for anything except
voting.


     http://www.bosstats.com/


BoSStats is a good testbed for FlightFeather, and has value of its
own, since meaningful advice about work-related problems is very hard
to find.  A "Wisdom of Crowds" solution -- particularly with strong
privacy protection (see below) -- is a necessary addition to this
field.

FlightFeather's most important feature is that all write requests
generate (or modify) HTML files.  In consequence, a pure read (the
most common operation) merely serves static pages.

The major design focus for FlightFeather are responsiveness and
performance; the system should eventually support very high traffic
volumes.  In addition, FlightFeather allows for a great deal of user
privacy -- a critical, rapidly emerging problem in the social
networking realm.